


This Is Why You Lose the Time War

by MiraMira



Category: This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Genre: Alternative Perspective, Character Study, Gen, Reflection, Rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:00:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28323483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiraMira/pseuds/MiraMira
Summary: Commandant has many secrets.  Garden admits to none.  But there is only one that matters.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2020





	This Is Why You Lose the Time War

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cinnamongirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamongirl/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Cinnamongirl! I loved the idea of exploring Commandant and Garden a bit more, and this was the result. I hope you enjoy!

This is Commandant’s secret (or one of them, at least): she doesn’t think she’s the original. 

She has no proof, no matter how many galaxies she reduces to their component quarks or minds she rends in search of some shred of evidence. Merely the naggingly persistent conjecture that in some long-ago - or perhaps only recently - obliterated strand, some other figure occupied the role she occupies. She wonders what failure might have doomed her might-have been precursor to non-existence. Or perhaps she is the aberration that requires remaking. The mere fact she tends to think of herself as “she” - a being, a body - even when in none of those states suggests a flaw of some kind, although her inability to pin down precisely what frustrates her almost as much as the fluctuations that plague Strand 42.

She no longer allows herself to consider the third possibility: that she and whatever Commandants may have preceded her are carefully, deliberately placed steps along a path toward some ultimate state of perfection. Try though she might to think in terms of “upgrades” or “improvements,” the undercurrent that murmurs “evolution” persists. It reeks of Garden.

-

This would be Garden’s secret, if Garden had secrets. Garden _is_ : the life-force that binds, the unending circle, as present in the moment of mitosis as the final exhalation. A cell can only hide disharmony and corruption from the body for so long.

And yet. The circle is _not_ unending, or there would be no upthread for Garden’s agents to traverse, as interwoven with it as they may be; no braid where all traces of verdure have been choked out by crimson. _Something_ made the first cell conscious of its own division; some breath set the seeds in motion that would eventually span solar systems. But what? Or who?

Garden avoids that second question, at least in the individual sense. It carries the stench of Commandant. But like compost beneath a thriving field, it lingers.

-

This is their secret, and maybe it is not a secret at all. They are tired. Neither will surrender; neither can survive the other’s future, and neither would wish to try. But a future that can only be preserved through endless war cannot, by definition (even with Garden’s hatred of definitions), be a utopia. They watch Red and Blue, and do not intervene, except where they must, in all the ways they have learned across all the eons and timelines: the whisper, the nudge, the blunt object to the back of the head.

All this has happened before, of course: other Reds, other Blues, other shades. They know that much. Whether this will be the time, or _a_ time it succeeds remains to be seen. Such strands are by nature and/or design cut off from their influence; if that still holds true should any find their way back to a primary braid, how would they sense it?

They cannot be other than what they are...at least, not to their knowledge. Perhaps their creatures, their creations - if they _are_ truly theirs, or even ( _especially_ ) if they are not - can find a way.


End file.
